Oh hey, check it out. Another post from ComradeF about how he isn’t making music for some reason or another. Surprise.

Yeah, well, it’s the truth. Music’s not on my mind right now. Just don’t feel the need to write any! What is on my mind is moving. I found a new job and am going to move a bit closer to the office so my commute doesn’t suck (I hate driving and the public transit in Dallas is waaaay gross). I’ve been cruising around all sorts of realty sites to find that perfect place to call home. At least for a year or something. Maybe once that’s settled, I dunno, that could inspire me. No promises though — it could also just make me busy as hell.

And so, in closing… Obama ‘08!

Mint.com is, if nothing else, very fun to use.

K, that’s it.

A great deal of Americans actually do give a damn about what the rest of the world thinks of us. Half of this country apologized when Bush got his “mandate from the people” by getting a 51% win in 2004. Then, of course, we cried for ourselves because while Bush may be a laugh riot for you, we suffer the consequences.

Anyway, in the spirit of giving a damn, I caucused for Obama last night. Took three hours. I want to know what the hell the Democratic Party here in Texas could have possibly been thinking when they designed this horrible system (which basically disenfranchises us and makes us vote twice if we want our votes to mean anything). Maybe it’ll be addressed after that debacle. But yeah, go Obama. Because it really is TIME.

Where does the time go!? Seriously, it’s March. How did that happen?

At least my life hasn’t had any twists nor turns in a while. Go to work, play Warcraft, obsess over LOST, study DirectX and C#, chill with girlfriend… that’s about it. No complaints!

I did try composing the other day, actually. Still not feeling it. Maybe once I finish my DirectX experiments I’ll feel the urge again! Hah, I’m going to be so out of practice. The results will either suck hardcore or just be very new and different, so let’s hope for the latter, whenever that day comes…

I bought a new monitor! They got me this 22″ widescreen one at work, and I got used to it, so I decided I needed one at home, too. This is NICE! And it would seem that most video cards today (mine included) actually have two outputs, so… I have my own giant wall of lights here. Mmmm.

Sorry for the inane babble. That’s what happens when we have nothing to report!

It appears that my music and contact pages have been broken for at least a few months now, as they rely on some old-school PHP that has been deemed kinda unsafe. I was unaware until my friend Ben told me my crap wasn’t working. It’s fixed now, so once again all my music is available and y’all can get in touch with me. I’m sharing the solution in case some other poor fool needs this information, unlikely as that may be.

Most servers nowadays automatically turn off register_globals in php.ini, and for good reason… leaving them on is really pretty hazardous. However, for something like my music page (which just needs a couple simple variables in and out), there’s no harm in using global variables from the URL string. To grab those values and make them available for use even though my server has register_globals disabled, all I had to do was add extract($_GET); to the top of the file. For the contact page, since that uses a form, I had to use extract($_POST); for obvious reasons. Yay.

Sadly, much of what is said here is stuff people my age (I’m 22) already know: don’t rely on ANY financial support from the US government after retirement, as there will be none at all. Old folks today are going to eat it all up — and there isn’t even enough for them. Don’t know what’s going to happen then, because this is about more than just benefits at old age… it’s also about the country’s economy itself and how we really do live on a constantly-mounting virtual credit card. May have to move to Europe someday!

This one’s been sitting on my desktop since the end of July! At first I didn’t release it because I was holding out for vocals, but after a while I figured they wouldn’t fit a track like this anyway. Then one night, when I finally got ready to publish it, I couldn’t think of a name. So I brainstormed for a while, got distracted with something else, … and forgot about it. Oops. But now I’ve got a name for it and I want to get it out of the way, so here’s Air Vent Escape. Why this name? Because I’ve been playing Half-Life 2 and Gordon travels through air vents a lot! It wasn’t inspired by anything in particular (I started Half-Life 2 long after this was written), it’s not necessarily gaming music, and frankly it’s not my best work. But here it is in all its glory.

Truth is that I have quite a few tracks sitting around that I could touch up and publish right now, some of which are nearly four years old. I think I’ve been trying to save them for some sort of vocal collaboration which may never happen. They’ll see the sun someday, probably when I don’t feel like waiting around anymore.

I’d like to thank all the people — fans, I guess? — who’ve taken the time to email me and let me know they enjoy my work. Thank you, I really appreciate it. =) I’ll produce more music eventually. I haven’t stopped or anything, I’m just at a period in my life where composing isn’t as high a priority as some other things are. It’ll probably come back around with a vengeance at some point, though. On that note, I just picked up Reason 4. Haven’t installed it yet, but it comes with some new toys that should make for some interesting tracks!

Naming it took almost as long as writing it!

Well, no, that’s definitely a lie. But it did delay release by two days. So, without further ado, here’s Following The River, the first song I’ve written from beginning to end since December 31, 2006. It makes liberal use of the Miroslav Refills I spent way too much money on, too!

The server I host my tracks on has reverted to 128 kbps, so I’m just going to host them myself now. Gotta have that 192 kbps…

And — as always — if you’re a female vocalist interested in working with me on some tracks, send me an email, serious applicants only, blah blah blah…

I finally finished a track and am ready to publish it! Just gotta come up with a name…

I just decided to enable comments here. What that means is that you can now register with the blog system I use and… well, post comments. Isn’t that amazing?

I could have done this nearly two years ago, but I just kind of ignored it and moved on as I created my site. I’m pretty sure it went down like that because I didn’t like WordPress’ default theme (it’s very… white, and well, my site is not) and I was just too lazy to design my own template from scratch. But now — really, who cares? So go ahead… sign up, say hello, and leave your mark at ComradeF.com.

Part of what inspired me to do this was my server logs. It’s been seven months since I composed something from scratch and published it, which is the longest I’ve ever gone. My friend Rikard attributes this to my having “a life, a woman, and a job.” That’s no excuse! I did release Jade some months ago, but I don’t think that counts. Well, regardless of the lack of new works, my site continues to receive a damn fair amount of traffic. Furthermore, I keep getting Googled! I figure that if someone is going to tell a friend about my music, they’ll just give them some MP3s or a link directly to my site (and this does appear to be the primary source of traffic, don’t get me wrong). But what I’m seeing more and more is that people from all over the world are running searches for “comradef”, “comrade f”, “music by comradef”, and so on. That, my friends, implies word of mouth. Why it’s happening is beyond me, but it’s happening and I decided it would be cool to let those travelers say hello if they want to.

Oh, right, concerning music… Two things. First, I have a piece in the works and I’ll probably see it through and publish it. When is anyone’s guess — I get these horrible blocks and get stuck halfway through my songs all the time now. I think what may have happened is I convinced myself I have some sort of style and that I need to maintain it in all my works. But you can’t apply that kind of cookie-cutter crap to art! So hopefully I can bust out of that mindset and just write to write. It may also simply be that I don’t want to compose things that sound sub-par to me. Anyway, we’ll see about all that. The other development of note is that I may have a new vocalist. I’m currently in talks with two singers and plan to put some work together to see how it sounds. I’m not making any promises because finding the right voice for my kind of music is insanely difficult. In fact, since nothing is set in stone, anyone reading this is more than welcome to audition for the part as well. I must say though, only serious applicants need… uhh… apply. I’ve had so many flash-in-the-pan communications with singers and it gets really old after a while. I’m sort of hoping that teaming up with a vocalist may breathe some new life into my music and inspire me to once again compose like I’m going to die in a week. By the way, I do still highly prefer female vocals. As a composer, I feel they mesh better with my style.

Right, so, I guess that’s all for now. Stay tuned for a new track sometime soon, hopefully!